Category Archives: Admissions

Earlier today, over 100 Michael Roth clones were spotted tiptoeing up the steps in Olin Library just before 12:30. Incoming reports suggest that these clones were birthed last night in the basement of 269 High Street in a 400 year old pagan ritual of excess. Or something like that.

These clones entered the library just before the noon WesFest tours were to make a stroll through, at which point they stripped down to their underwear and probably read The History of Sexuality or On the Interpretation of Dreams. We’ve got visual evidence:

Real news alert: according to an Instagram post from Wesleyan Admission, regular decision admissions letters were released to the Class of 2021 today at 3PM. Excitement! If you’re a current student, this means several things: (1) We’re old, really old, (2) We’re that much closer to WesFest and thesis deadline and 4/20?, and (3) many reflections on the cyclical nature of things, in times like these, in places such as right here.

“The numbers are always underwritten by the real struggles against classism and the impactful activism of low-income students.”

[Updated 1/24/17, 9:45AM] The infographic has the minimum wage at Wesleyan listed as $9.60. This was the wage for 2016, but the state of Connecticut raised the wage to $10.10 effective Jan. 2017. Many thanks to Noah Kahan ’19 for catching this.

For countless cycles of matriculation, prospective Wes students have been concerned about our reputation on College Confidential. TBT amirite? This worry soon goes away (hopefully), for a variety of reasons. Despite our Forbes ranking of #9 in the country last year, I’d say most of us still don’t put much stock in college rankings.

The Forbes ranking system focuses on present value and return on investment. Basically, they tend to prioritize student satisfaction rates and alumni earnings, among other things. This system countered US News’ prioritizing of prestige measures like endowment size and “quality” of applicant pool (think SAT scores). In a similar vein to Forbes, the New York Times just released a host of rankings based on, you know, what you can actually expect to gain (financially) from college. Their rankings were released last Wednesday and focus on measures of upward mobility.

The rankings come from a study by The Equality of Opportunity Project in which the authors construct what they call “mobility report cards” for every single college in America. These report cards tracked student and parental income data from 1999-2013. The Timespublished some great interactive data visualizations from the study, searchable by college. As you can tell from the headline, we were curious about how Wesleyan stacked up. Let’s break it down:

If you are a current student and were around campus at all yesterday, you likely saw hundreds of posters in Exley, a performance installation outside of North College, and/or the interruption of campus tours.

The multitude of actions occurring yesterday came in concert with October Open House, a yearly event put together by the Office of Admission. Yesterday’s open house (and the next one on November 11th) comes prior to Wesleyan’s November 15th deadline for Early Decision I, and is intended to give prospective students a more in-depth view of Wesleyan life than the normal Admissions programming.

A number of students have been organizing in response to conversations that happened at last week’s WhoRunsWes town hall, where more than 200 students reached a consensus to push for the removal of Antonio Farias and Michael Roth from their positions at the University. The intent of these actions was to highlight administrative failures, disrupt the Wesleyan brand, and make visible the pain students have experienced due to the institution’s shortcomings.

Read past the jump for more on what transpired, images and a video from today’s actions.

Hi so Regular Decision notifications went out today. This year, Wes set its record for the highest number of applications received, a 22% increase from last year. If you check the Wesleyan thread on College Confidential (yikes), not only will you be wondering why you are there, but you will also know that I’m not bullshitting you, the decisions are actually out.

Well folks, for the past four years, I’ve been Wesleying’s dedicated Early Decision Correspondent, and alas, the time has come for me to make my last Early Decision acceptances post and pass the torch on to some other bitch who likes combing through Wesleyan’s College Confidential threads (Lord help that poor soul).

Today, admissions sent Early Decision letters to the class of 2020. That means that the majority of these lil prefrosh were born in 1998, and a couple were born in ’99 (maybe even one or two in 2000?!?!?!). DAMN. WE’RE A BUNCH OF ARCHAIC MOTHERFUCKERS.

What absurd criteria did BI use for calculating their rankings? They went with a very fun and very biased, classist, racist, awful thing called standardized test scores (I think even frosh in intro soc can explain how this is problematic).

Here’s my favorite quote from BI about why they decided that using SAT/ACT scores was a fab idea:

The economic value of a university is equal to the gap between how much money its graduates earn, and how much they might have made had they studied elsewhere.

Of course, while the former is easy to find nowadays, the latter is where things turn into something out of NUMB3RS. The Economist says it uses some fancy “multiple regression analysis” and runs it through a shit ton of software and *poof* there’s your ranking. Whatevs, Economist.

But if you think our ranking is bad, I’m here to make it worse: Here’s a list of schools with “Wesleyan” in their names that beat us:

Are you considering a career in medicine? Are you interested in pursuing a dual degree, like an MD/MPH or MD/PhD? Then we invite you to join us for Ask a Med Student! hosted by AMSA on Friday, March 27th. This is meant to be an informal event for students to engage with two medical students at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine.

Come prepared with questions, and we’ll be ready with pizza! Invite all your pre-med friends!

The announcement(at)wesleyan(dot)eduemail addressis here to ruin all of your snowy fun:

To the Wesleyan Community:

The University will be open tomorrow, and scheduled classes and events are expected to resume. It will be cold and windy, and we ask everyone to exercise extreme caution when outside on campus. Although the grounds crew is working to clear parking lots, snowy walkways may be difficult, so please wear appropriate shoes. A Middletown street parking ban may still be in effect; extra parking (and shuttle service) will be available at Long Lane.